A Review ...

From HPR (Read the whole thing here):

As with all his writings, Russell Shaw’s latest Catholic literary product, Catholic Laity in the Mission of the Church, is rich, balanced, reasoned, lucid, concise, poignant, and widely accessible. In the volume, he takes up a theme that he has continued to address and develop over the course of his career, i.e., the proper nature, role, and function for the Catholic laity.

To cut to the chase: Russell Shaw notes an unhappy irony regarding the contemporary situation of the Catholic laity. On the one hand, since the Second Vatican Council and at the level of official, articulated Church doctrine, never have the laity been given such a clear, brilliant, compelling, and inspiring mission so full of promise for themselves, the Church, and the society, i.e., of the lay apostolate dedicated to the evangelization of the world.

...However, on the other hand, for Shaw, the great promise of the laity since Vatican II has gone woefully unfulfilled because of two developments that he analyzes at length, the first more so than the second, i.e., 1) the “clericalization of the laity” and 2) a widespread secularization both at the level of culture and within the hearts and minds of many nominal and dissenting Catholics.

Read the whole thing- or even better, read the book!